It will be interesting to see how this goes. The Fed penalty is pretty severe.
This is becoming a major problem to cities with older conventional radio systems. You can buy a cheap Chinese radio on Amazon for under $50, learn how to program it in no time, and find the frequencies on RadioReference with a couple of clicks.
During the NYC riots, the main Citiwide frequencies were being maliciously jammed by rioters and their sympathizers, and the dispatchers had no clue what was going on. It is literally impossible to stop them short of getting extremely lucky like what happened here or having a dedicated direction finding team hunt them down...which doesn’t work too well in a riot.
What departments are now doing is buying all new digital trunked radio systems (for many $Millions), and encrypting them so they cannot even be monitored, let alone interfered with.
To me this goes too far. Patrol frequencies keep honest citizens aware of what’s happening in their neighborhood, and there are plenty of options for sensitive tactical comms to encrypt or use cell phones.
As for this cretin, he’s done like dinner. In addition to the state criminal charges, the FCC will likely descend on him like a ton of bricks, with fines in the $20,000 range.